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Handedness

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

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Definition

In daily life, human’s right and left hands often work in union. However, for some tasks, individuals show a preference for a dominant hand, such as for printing and writing. Some may prefer to use left hand, some may prefer right hand, and others may not show any preference for any hand. This individual difference in preference for using a hand is handedness. Handedness is not a categorical variable, but a continuum ranging from strong left to strong right (Annett 2002). In most cases, we typically have three different types of handedness, namely right-handedness, left-handedness, and mixed-handedness. Among the total population, right-handedness predominates, whereas left-handedness makes up only for around 10%. In addition, it has been revealed that men have a larger proportion of left-handedness than women, with an odds ratio being 1.23 (Papadatou-Pastou et al. 2008; Vuoksimaa and Kaprio 2010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of psychology, Beijing Normal University, Haidan District, Beijing, 100875, China

    Quanlei Yu & Yafei Guo

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  1. Quanlei Yu
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  2. Yafei Guo
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Correspondence to Quanlei Yu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Julie Schermer

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Yu, Q., Guo, Y. (2017). Handedness. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_758-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_758-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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